Facebook and Instagram introduce some interesting updates to their ‘Stories’ feature

Facebook has been rolling out a slew of new features and graphics support in order to improve the level of engagement and social connect between users of the social media site. Its latest update has made a few changes to the 'Stickers' option on Facebook and 'Stories' option in Instagram.

Facebook has been rolling out a slew of new features and graphics support in order to improve the level of engagement and social connect between users of the social media site. Its latest update has made a few changes to the ‘Stickers’ option on Facebook and ‘Stories’ option in Instagram.

Changes on Facebook Site

Facebook runs a ‘Stickers’ program that picks artists and develops sticker packs. These stickers convey a range of emotions in a refreshingly different way – a key reason for the program’s success among the site’s users. Last week, the site went ahead and added a few more stickers to enhance the stickers’ efficacy in promoting collaboration among the users.

With these new stickers, Facebook allows users to add in name, weather, and location. With the name sticker, you can tag friends and communicate in an interactive and refreshingly unique way on Facebook. These options are already present on Instagram Stories. But for those who are present only on Facebook (and not Instagram), it is certainly a new addition that users would want to try out. Even for other users, the new stickers provide more options to Facebook Stories. It gives them better reasons to try it out on Facebook and thus, improve distribution and engagement

On the anvil are other updates that take a cue from Instagram. Some examples include polls for Facebook Stories, which would be similar to the ones we see on Instagram Stories. For many users, there is a lot of content on the News Feed view but hardly any content present in the Stories module.

For B2B marketers, this is digital whitespace can be utilised for brand marketing. This sounds interesting especially considering that the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, himself stated that more emphasis would be given to Stories and it would be as mainstream as News Feed is today.

Changes on Instagram Site

On the Instagram site, there are reports of Instagram Stories mentions now coming up in user notifications. This provides a lot of visibility value to the in-stories tagging option. Users will now be better notified of the mentions. This, in turn, could improve the functionality of the feature. As an outcome, B2B marketers may utilise this functionality for a better level of engagement and improved connection facilities.

There has been another noteworthy update to Instagram Stories. Images and videos that are presented in square or landscape layout will be rendered into full – screen view in Stories. With this, advertisers can easily reach people across Instagram and Facebook. In the mobile view, this will mean three key updates –

1. The whitespace will be filed with an appropriate background colour

2. The text in the post will be added in Stories text below the image or video

3. The destination URL will be integrated with a ‘Swipe Up’ facility.

The aim is to cross utilise the Facebook ads in Instagram as well. As a result, marketers need not re-calibrate the Facebook image or video layout when they want to use it in Instagram Stories.

What do you think of the new updates to Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories? Do write to us with your views in the comments below.